Saving energy in tea factories

Those little leaves inside your tea bag have had a fair old journey to get from the field to your kitchen. Around half of them, in fact, started their life in Kenya.

Kenya is a country where the roots of tea run deep, with 2.5m Kenyans relying on tea as their key source of income. To put that in perspective, that’s about the same size as the entire UK construction industry.

Those 2.5m people and their livelihoods are at serious risk from the effects of climate change. If the planet’s temperature continues to rise at the rates scientists predict, tea bushes may simply be unable to grow there within 50 years.

It means energy efficiency is a very big topic in the Kenyan tea industry at the moment. And as we’re aiming to be carbon neutral by 2020, it’s a very big topic for us too. So we’ve been working with other organisations in Kenya to help reduce the carbon footprint of tea factories – you can find out a bit more about it in the video below.

If you have any questions about our carbon neutral goals, our approach to sustainability or any of the other work we do at home and in the places our tea grows, please email us at hello@yorkshiretea.co.uk

All images supplied by GIZ/ Pherez Sigu

Our project partners were the Kenya Tea Development Agency, GIZ (a sustainable development organisation which works with the German government), the Ethical Tea Partnership and Mars.